To her critics, she's just another cookie-cutter teen starlet. But, as Luke Benedictus discovered, there's more to Mandy than meets the eye.

About halfway through my allotted interview time with Mandy Moore, and feeling things are moving along swimmingly if a little by the numbers, I attempt to steer the conversation into more personal territory. The teen pop star turned actor was for two years the girlfriend of American tennis star Andy Roddick (they broke up in March). She might, it strikes me, be in a position to offer some tips for Paris Hilton about dating tennis players now that the hard-partying heiress has reportedly taken up with our own Mark Philippoussis.

Sadly, Moore doesnít take well to the suggestion. Her voice - normally rapid, girly and a little high-pitched - drops to a near whisper. She holds my gaze firm and long, and says simply, "I have no advice for dating tennis players".

Moore is all too obviously a showbiz professional, and too good at this interview lark to betray any real sign of her irritation, but quite clearly she is seething. The relentless enthusiasm that has been bubbling through her long, tumbling sentences has suddenly disappeared. So has any pretence of goodwill towards her interviewer.

It's not until the next day that I understand why Moore was so miffed. According to Hollywood gossip columnists, while allegedly "in love" with Philippoussis, Ms Hilton was in fact seen in a Las Vegas clinch with Roddick just the day before my interview with Moore. Oh dear. What is most telling about the gaffe is, in retrospect, the way Moore kept her composure.

Having landed her first record contract at 14, she has spent much of her life doing publicity, sitting through endless interviews in the bland luxury of five-star hotels. In the process she has mastered the knack of answering every question with supreme diplomacy, carefully qualifying her responses and defusing any question of the merest whiff of controversy. As a result she is is quite impenetrable. She keeps you at armslength with a cheery barrage of superlatives while the real Moore (assuming there is one) remains far beyond.

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The super-friendly face she projects as she earnestly thanks the photographer for his time and hopes that he has a great day may be undercut by the icy professionalism at its core but itís hard to fault it all the same.

So who, exactly, is Mandy Moore? Unless you're a teenage pop fan or delight in films that climax with the high school prom, her name may be vaguely familiar but difficult to place. This is understandable. Telling apart the various pop princesses competing to be crowned the new Britney Spears can be tricky for the uninitiated. And while Moore did dye her hair brown to help distinguish her from the other platinumblonde starlets, confusion can still arise.

So a quick Mandy Moore refresher course can't hurt. The American actor-singer - daughter of a pilot father and newsreader mother - has released four albums, starred in six films and hosted her own MTV show. Not bad going at the age of 20. She burst onto the scene five years ago with her debut album So Real (sample lyric: "Your love's sweet as candy/I'll be forever yours/Love, Mandy") which sold more than a million copies in America. Meanwhile, Moore has outdone Britney (Crossroads), Mariah Carey (Glitter) and Madonna (Swept Away) at the box office to forge a credible career as a crossover pop diva/actress. She recently launched her own line of clothing, Mblem, too.

Perched on a leather sofa in Melbourne's Park Hyatt hotel, Moore is definitely not one of those celebrities who seem smaller in the flesh. She stands 178 centimetres in her bare feet and, as befits a Neutrogena spokeswoman, her flawless complexion radiates good health. With enormous sunbeam smiles punctuating every sentence, she is alarmingly bright and breezy. After each question you're almost knocked backwards by the sheer number of positive sentiments she crams into her answers. The new music she's working on, for example, will form a "classic, classy pop record, organic and fun and different". Her new film Saved!, which is what she is here to spruik, is "smart and witty and sort of irreverent and funny and cool".

Moore's assessment of Saved! is actually pretty accurate, at least for the first half of the film. The teen-comedy, produced by REM singer Michael Stipe, begins as a satirical high school flick about the hypocrisy of sanctimonious Bible bashers. Jena Malone plays Mary, a student at the American Eagle Christian School, whose boyfriend Dean (Chad Faust) is an ice-skater for Jesus. But when Dean confesses that he's actually gay, Mary gives up her virginity in a misguided attempt to cure him. Unfortunately, she winds up pregnant and Dean stays gay. When his parents discover a copy of Honcho magazine under his mattress, they pack him off to Mercy House for "de-gayification".

Mary's pregnancy means she is cruelly ostracised by the school's cool clique, headed by Moore's ultra-pious character Hilary Faye. Instead, Mary finds acceptance with the playground outsiders, the wheelchair-bound Roland (Macaulay Culkin), Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the school's only Jew, and Patrick the Christian skateboard champion (Patrick Fugit from Almost Famous).

Unfortunately, the film loses its nerve midway through and becomes as preachy as the religious zealots it targets. The satirical edge is blunted as the movie dissolves into a mushy moral lecture about the importance of universal love, tolerance and respect. Moore, however, is excellent as the fanatical cheerleader for the Lord and lead singer in school pop trio the Christian Jewels. While her character is ferociously judgemental, Moore still manages to win a flicker of sympathy for her when she finally gets her comeuppance. "She's the evil antagonist of the film," Moore explains. "But she also has a heart too. You can tell the reason she's motivated to kind of be evil is because she is just insecure and misguided and lost like most people that age are."

After playing a series of nice girls Moore relished the chance to play a manipulative bitch. But Saved! also appealed for its willingness to tackle controversial themes generally overlooked in teen comedies. "It's great that this film can come along and speak so candidly about topics that feel taboo within religion, like teen pregnancy and homosexuality, that are looked down upon especially in that world," she says. "There's not really a dialogue about those particular issues going on in most teen films."

This is in fact the second film in which Moore has played a character defined by her Christian beliefs. In A Walk To Remember she took the role of the devout-verging-on-angelic daughter of a Methodist preacher. While Moore insists this emerging pattern is purely coincidental, some people have questioned whether her acting career is now being driven by a religious agenda. "It's so funny," she says. "I meet people and they're like, 'You're really Christian aren't you?' And I'm like, 'Not really'. I was raised Catholic but that really has no bearing on the choices I make with my career."

In fact, Moore no longer even considers herself Catholic, relying instead on "my own hotchpotch of things that I believe". But it's no surprise that this perception of an underlying Christian influence persists given Moore's fiercely straight-laced image. You certainly wouldn't catch her getting down and dirty like Christina Aguilera. Nor would she do a Britney and cavort suggestively on stage with a python. Mandy Moore just isnít the kind of gal who likes to fly by the seat of her hotpants.

Indeed, within the industry she has practically become a by-word for the squeaky clean. When the singer Pink announced her desire to move into movies, she specified that what she was after was, "A Mandy Moore role. I want to be sweet and innocent. I want to be a petite tulip".

Moore doesn't especially want to uproot this image. She claims she doesn't mind being thought of a little like Olivia Newton-John's character in Grease before the tough-girl makeover. "I am pretty wholesome, I'll admit," she says. "I live in my own little bubble. I'm a homebody, Iím lazy, I don't go out, I don't party."

Even her tattoo - a heart shape smaller than a 5 cent piece on the tip of her toe - seems more childish quirk than gesture of rebellion. "People think that I did it myself with a pen," Moore admits ruefully. "They're like, 'Why did you doodle on your foot?' I'm like, 'It's a tattoo'."

To now, Moore's conservative image has worked to her advantage. By refusing to cater to the top-shelf fantasies about girls on the cusp of womanhood, she has managed to increase her appeal as a role model to a younger audience. This is big business. The tween market - kids aged between infancy and adolescence - is said to be worth $471 million a year in Australia alone. Moore has managed to cash in on the prepubescent dollar, along with other cutesy tween queens like the Olsen twins and Hilary Duff. But now sheís hit 20, there are signs that Moore is growing out of her Teen Vogue pin-up girl phase.

She acknowledges that her good-girl reputation at times threatens to stifle her budding career as an actress. "The only thing that is frustrating in a sense is that it can be hard to get people to see a different side of you," she says. "Because they think, 'Oh Mandy Moore she's wholesome and sweet,' they wouldn't think of you for certain roles so you have to go in and fight a little bit harder."

Moore is also remarkably scathing about her early pop career, despite the fact that it is what made her name. "I look back with embarrassment at the first record and stuff," she says. "I was so young . . . I cringe thinking about it. But what can you do? You evolve, you grow up, your musical tastes change, you change. It's all part of the deal."

But what will Mandy Moore evolve into? Musically she appears to crave the respect of a serious singer-songwriter, but this would sit awkwardly with the public's impression of her as the equivalent of Cliff Richard's younger sister. On her last record, Coverage, she attempted to claw back some credibility by covering songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Blondie and Cat Stevens. She even funded the record herself in order to have complete creative control. But despite her belief in the project Coverage failed to capture the publicís imagination and quietly slipped out of the charts.

Still, music remains Moore's first love, and starring in a Broadway show is her greatest ambition. "For me being on stage and doing theatre is just the ultimate thing to do," she says. "You have to be so on your game to do live theatre. It's just a completely different lifestyle and you have to be so disciplined. If the right thing comes along for me it's so worth taking the time out of doing a film or a record. It makes me so happy."

Whatever does come next Moore admits she is at a kind of crossroads in her life. As well as ditching her boyfriend this year she also changed record labels, moving from Epic to Sire Records, whose roster includes indie-rockers the Von Bondies and the Distillers. Moore insists she is excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. "Itís such a clean slate, you know,Ē she says. ďI really feel like Iíve started a new chapter in my life. Turning 20, my whole life has sort of changed and Iím in a much better place in every sense of the word. Iím much more aware of everything and wiser and just happier.Ē

Moore is releasing a greatest hits album next month - before she has even reached her 21st birthday. Clearly, behind all the sweetness and light there must lie some form of stone-cold ruthless ambition. Reportedly, by the age of six Moore had already set her mind on becoming a performer, and enrolled at a series of performing arts camps. At 14 she withdrew from her Catholic high school so she could go on tour to support The Backstreet Boys.

Like most entertainers who begin their careers at a young age, Moore seems far older than her years. In Chasing Liberty, she played the daughter of the American President, a girl who longed for the life of a normal teen away from the endless security cordons and long lenses of the prying paparazzi. Does Moore feel she too missed out on a normal adolescence?

She casually brushes away the suggestion. "I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I'm like, 'I didnít get to live a normal childhood and I regret that, and I'm going to go crazy because of it, I'm just going to live this wild life'. I just sort of skipped all that and I donít have a problem with that."

Still, you can't help but feel that the way Moore repeatedly describes herself as a "casual jeans and T-shirt girl" might be in part in response to the hours of being primped and preened for all those photoshoots (besides, there is also the new line of T-shirts to promote as well).

Moore is reluctant to acknowledge how unusual her upbringing was, which is fair enough given her image is based on being the idealised girl-next-door. But she does reveal that during the filming of Saved! the cast was especially excited at the prospect of filming the endof- year prom scenes. It turned out that many of the actors' careers had begun when they were teenagers (in Macaulay Culkin's case even earlier) and, like Moore, they had missed out on their own school prom.

"Like Jen (Malone) didn't get to do prom and Mac (Culkin) didn't go to prom," Moore says. "So all of us were like, 'Woo-hoo'. We treated it like our real prom, we were all so excited about the decorations and stuff. So we finally got to have our own prom while making the movie."

Sure, it's hard to work up too much sympathy. Yet there is something strangely poignant about the image of a bunch of ageing child stars dancing happily around a hired film set, trying to manufacture real-life experiences out of makebelieve. Mandy Moore may insist sheís living the dream, but itís hard to escape the conclusion that sheís had to give up a lot to do so.